[Errno 32] Broken pipe in s3cmd

In order to backup a bunch of servers I’m using s3cmd to backup files to a Amazon S3 account. s3cmd is a really nice tool as it works from the command line, does encryption on the fly and can use the https protocol for upload.

I used

s3cmd -configure

and set everything up. The first error I got when I tried to test it was:

s3cmd put file.tar.gz s3://my_bucket_name/file.tar.gz

[Errno 32] Broken pipe

and it tried throttling down and uploading again. What I didn’t know was that:

• if your file is over 5Gb it will give this error
• if you just created the bucket it may take a few minutes to start working
• you get this error if the bucket doesn’t exist (you mistyped it)